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Dec. 2nd, 2013 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyChina Launches Moon Rover Mission
http://nyti.ms/1eDASVX
HONG KONG — China’s latest display of ambition in space involves sending a Jade Rabbit roaming across the Bay of Rainbows.
A rocket blasted off from southwest China early Monday, carrying the country’s first robotic lunar rover, the Jade Rabbit, which will explore a plain on the moon that, despite its colorful name, is a dark expanse of hardened lava.
If successful, the Chang’e-3 mission will be China’s first “soft landing” on the moon — which allows a craft to operate after descending — and the first such landing by any country since 1976, when the Soviet Union sent a probe. The United States is the other country that has mastered soft lunar landings, and the last American expedition on the moon’s surface was a manned visit in 1972. Chinese state-run television broadcast footage of the rocket’s untroubled launch and ascent into space, where the Chang’e-3 craft set off toward the moon.
For China’s Communist Party under President Xi Jinping, such feats embody his rallying cry of a “Chinese dream” of patriotic unity under one-party rule, supported by technological advances and rising international stature.
“If it’s all successful, it will certainly indicate that they have really come up the learning curve in terms of technology,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College in Rhode Island who researches China’s space activities. Professor Johnson-Freese emphasized that she was giving her own views.
“China’s getting a lot of prestige, which turns into geostrategic influence, from the fact that they are the third country to have manned spaceflight capabilities, that they are going to the moon,” she said.
The Chinese state-run news media has responded to the launch from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center with jubilation. That is likely to reach a climax in about two weeks, when the landing vehicle is scheduled to descend on the moon and release the Jade Rabbit, or Yutu, robotic rover to start sending back data and pictures from Sinus Iridum, or the Bay of Rainbows, a basaltic plain formed from lava that filled a crater.
But as well as patriotic pride, China’s space activities are generating skills to enhance the country’s science, satellites and military, experts said. China’s advances in space include five manned flights, which are intended to pave the way for a space station. The country is also developing an array of new satellites, including the BeiDou navigation system that will have a chain of 35 satellites. Many of the advances used for better rockets and space guidance can be applied in missiles.
“Simple prestige is certainly a key driver in a lot of China’s space programs, in particular the manned space program,” said Mark Stokes, the executive director of the Project 2049 Institute, a research organization in Washington focused on security issues in Asia. “It’s also a way to mobilize resources and to concentrate resources in a way that could result in certain types of spinoff technologies.”
Above all, China has been learning how to orchestrate complicated engineering tasks and to surmount the poor bureaucratic coordination that has often frustrated such efforts, said Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington who has studied China’s space programs.
“We in the U.S., in the West, tend to focus on the widget aspect of China’s space progress,” Mr. Cheng said. “But I would say that what we sometimes miss is how important these organizational changes are. All the Chinese space efforts are efforts at improving their systems engineering.”
China’s military drives the country’s space program, and that has caused wariness among Western governments. Suspicions have been magnified by allegations that China has stolen information for its space and missile programs. Congress passed a law in 2011 that bans the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from developing bilateral contacts with China, although multilateral contacts are not proscribed.
But China’s program has reached a point where deeper cooperation with the United States or Russia would make little difference, said Gregory Kulacki, China project manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He nonetheless supports closer contacts to foster cooperation and reduce mistrust. “They don’t really need to rely on any outside sources to continue to make the progress that they’re making,” Mr. Kulacki said.
China established a foothold in space in 1970, when a small, primitive satellite beamed back an ode to Mao Zedong, “The East is Red.” From the 1980s, the Communist Party leadership began to develop bigger plans, and in 2003, China sent its first astronaut into space. China has since carried out four more manned missions.
The Chang’e lunar exploration program, named after a moon goddess, began in 2007 with a craft that orbited the moon, and the Cheng’e-2 mission launched in 2010 sent back more detailed images of the moon, including of the area where Chang’e-3 will land. (The Chang’e-1 craft hurtled into the moon in a controlled, hard landing in 2009.)
For the Chang’e-3 mission, the rover — a solar-powered, six-wheeled vehicle similar to ones the United States has sent to Mars — will spend three months exploring and collecting data. A future mission that could take place in several years would be intended to bring back rocks and other samples from the moon. The Chinese government said in 2011 it was also studying sending an astronaut to the moon, but that remains a distant prospect.
Wage Strikes Planned at Fast-Food Outlets
http://nyti.ms/1eECNcP
December 1, 2013
Wage Strikes Planned at Fast-Food Outlets
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Seeking to increase pressure on McDonald’s, Wendy’s and other fast-food restaurants, organizers of a movement demanding a $15-an-hour wage for fast-food workers say they will sponsor one-day strikes in 100 cities on Thursday and protest activities in 100 additional cities.
As the movement struggles to find pressure points in its quest for substantially higher wages for workers, organizers said strikes were planned for the first time in cities like Charleston, S.C.; Providence, R.I.; and Pittsburgh.
The protests have expanded greatly since November 2012, when 200 fast-food workers engaged in a one-day strike at more than 20 restaurants in New York City, the first such walkout in the history of the nation’s fast-food industry.
“There’s been pretty huge growth in one year,” said Kendall Fells, one of the movement’s main organizers. “People understand that a one-day strike is not going to get them there. They understand that this needs to continue to grow.”
The movement, which includes the groups Fast Food Forward and Fight for 15, is part of a growing union-backed effort by low-paid workers — including many Walmart workers and workers for federal contractors — that seeks to focus attention on what the groups say are inadequate wages.
The fast-food effort is backed by the Service Employees International Union and is also demanding that restaurants allow workers to unionize without the threat of retaliation.
Officials with the National Restaurant Association have said the one-day strikes are publicity stunts. They warn that increasing pay to $15 an hour when the federal minimum wage is $7.25 would cause restaurants to rely more on automation and hire fewer workers.
Industry officials say that only a small percentage of fast-food jobs pay the minimum wage and that those are largely entry-level jobs for workers under 25.
Backers of the movement for higher pay point to studies saying that the average age of fast-food workers is 29 and that more than one-fourth are parents raising children.
Simon Rojas, who earns $8.07 an hour working at a McDonald’s in South Central Los Angeles, said he would join Thursday’s one-day strike.
“It’s very difficult to live off $8.07 an hour,” said Mr. Rojas, 23, noting that he is often assigned just 20 or 25 hours of work a week. “I have to live with my parents. I would like to be able to afford a car and an apartment.”
Mr. Rojas said he had studied for a pharmacy technician’s certificate, but he had been unable to save the $100 needed to apply for a license.
On Aug. 29, fast-food strikes took place in more than 50 cities. This week’s expanded protests will be joined by numerous community, faith and student groups, including USAction and United Students against Sweatshops.
Older Workers Are Increasingly Entering Fast-Food Industry
http://nyti.ms/1bZuVPW
On a recent Friday evening, Eduardo Shoy left work at 6 p.m. Mr. Shoy, a deliveryman for KFC and Pizza Hut, was coming off an eight-hour shift of driving three-cheese pies and crispy chicken fingers, in an automotive blur, to private homes and businesses in central Queens.
Now it was the weekend and he was headed home. He parked his car in the little alley lot behind his house and, passing through the door, he kicked his shoes off, donned a pair of slippers and prepared a mug of tea. He sat down with his television set and ate the box of chicken he had brought back from the restaurant. Within an hour, remote control beside him, still dressed in his uniform, he had drifted off to sleep.
If Mr. Shoy were differently employed, he might have remained that way till morning. But as a fast-food worker paid the minimum wage — $7.25 an hour in New York — he didn’t have the luxury. At 10 p.m., he was up again and back in his car, this time driving to his second job, as a forklift operator at Kennedy International Airport, where he makes $13 an hour. Having worked all day, he was about to work all night: from 11 p.m. until 7:30 a.m. At 3 that afternoon, he would return to his deliveries at the restaurant. Then, at 11, he would once again drive to the airport.
Altogether, on the weekend before Thanksgiving, Mr. Shoy would sleep for 13 hours and work for 44. “Tired?” he asked, sounding puzzled by the question. “I’m too busy to be tired.”
●
THERE ARE 55,000 fast-food workers in New York — more than the entire population of Harrisburg, Pa. — and most, like Mr. Shoy, are struggling to stitch together a living in an industry where the median wage is $8.90 an hour. Last year, fast-food workers in Manhattan earned average pay of $19,000 — or about the cost of Mr. Shoy’s Honda. In Brooklyn, it was $15,500; on Staten Island, less.
Since 2000, the number of fast-food jobs in New York City has increased by more than 50 percent — 10 times as fast as in any other type of private job. But the conspicuous increase has not received the attention given, say, to the city’s high-tech industry, nor has it lessened the financial insecurities of this growing work force.
According to a study released in October, only 13 percent of fast-food workers get health-insurance benefits at work. In New York State, three in five have received some form of government assistance in the last five years. Meanwhile, executive pay and profits in the industry are on the rise. Last winter, Bloomberg News determined that it would take a Chicago McDonald’s worker who earns $8.25 an hour more than a century on the clock to match the $8.75 million that the company’s chief executive made in 2011.
The classic image of the high-school student flipping Big Macs after class is sorely out of date. Because of lingering unemployment and a relative abundance of fast-food jobs, older workers are increasingly entering the industry. These days, according to the National Employment Law Project, the average age of fast-food workers is 29. Forty percent are 25 or older; 31 percent have at least attempted college; more than 26 percent are parents raising children. Union organizers say that one-third to one-half of them have more than one job — like Mr. Shoy, who is 58 and supports a wife and children.
The fast-food industry says that what is going on here is a structural anomaly: that its wages were not intended to sustain a permanent work force — especially adults supporting families — and that it is happening because of larger economic forces. “The minimum wage was never meant to be a living wage,” said Steve Caldeira, the president of the International Franchise Association, a trade group for restaurants and other franchised firms. “It was meant, from the start, for entry-level workers and for those with lower skills.”
Traditionally, the fast-food industry has proved resistant to unionization. There is no one central employer against whom to strike, because most of the restaurants are franchised. McDonald’s and Burger King alone have tens of thousands of locations across the country. And until very recently, the demographic nature of the workers themselves was also a problem: many, as the industry said, were youthful transients and proved difficult to organize at job sites they were likely to leave.
But a year ago last week, the largest series of strikes against the fast-food industry in American history began in New York City. The protests started at a McDonald’s at Madison Avenue and 40th Street, where scores of angry workers stood in front of the familiar golden arches, waving signs and chanting rhyming slogans. By the end of the day, workers at dozens of franchised restaurants — Burger Kings, Taco Bells, Wendy’s and the like — had walked off the job, in an action that concluded with a rally outside a McDonald’s in Times Square.
Working under the name Fast Food Forward and funded by a giant labor group, the Service Employees International Union, the organizers set a pair of goals — to unionize the industry and to make demands for a $15 minimum wage — and began an unusual campaign of one-day flash strikes. The strategy caught on. Last April, five months after the first strike in New York, the fast-food actions — now with the umbrella name Fight for 15 (for the $15 wage demand) — spread to cities such as Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Seattle and Kansas City. Over the summer, thousands more fast-food workers took to the streets in nearly 50 municipalities, including Memphis and Raleigh, N.C., in the traditionally union-resistant South.
In New York, the recent elections resulted in the city’s three top positions — mayor, public advocate and comptroller — all being filled by supporters of the campaign, while the incoming City Council could be among the most union-friendly in decades, said Jonathan Westin, an organizer of the movement here. Mr. Westin also said support for a higher minimum wage was slowly growing among state lawmakers in Albany.
There was another sign of the movement’s growth — small, but not insignificant — that went unnoticed in the noisy play of politics.
Eduardo Shoy, a man too busy to sleep for more than four hours a night, made time this summer to attend his first strike.
●
MR. SHOY IS NOT what one would call a radical man. Quiet, industrious and unyieldingly easygoing, he joined the fast-food movement only after watching himself and his family descend from what seemed like a once-secure position in the middle class.
In 2008, when he was 53, Mr. Shoy lost his job driving forklifts at a warehouse on Long Island owned by the Waldbaum’s grocery-store chain. His salary at the job, which he had had for more than 20 years, was $22 an hour, and came with overtime and benefits, he said. His wife, Elana, worked as a waitress until three years ago, when she tore a ligament in her knee and had to quit. In 2003, before any of that had happened, the couple bought a house for more than $500,000 — a comfortable three-bedroom on a quiet street in Middle Village, Queens.
Now the house is almost empty, devoid of furniture except for a couch, a table and the bed wedged between them in the basement, where Mr. Shoy sleeps these days, alone. Two months ago, his wife and children — Eduardo Jr., 22, and Leslie, 19 — moved to Pennsylvania, where Leslie plans to enter college next year (with the help of financial aid) and where Eduardo Jr. works in a warehouse for Amazon.com. Mr. Shoy has remained behind, doing what he calls “the bachelor thing — working,” until he manages to sell the house that he can no longer afford.
“I thought I’d spend my life here,” he said the other day, standing in the vacancy that used to be his living room. “The way I had it planned, I’d be retired by now: full pension, Social Security. But things turned out a little different in the end. You do the best you can.”
Working more than 70 hours a week between his two jobs, Mr. Shoy makes a quasi-livable income: about $43,000 a year. But out of that, he has to pay his mortgage, his utilities, his car lease, his car insurance premiums and his children’s car insurance premiums, and then write a check each month to help them with their rent.
“Whatever comes first, I pay first,” he said.
Just two weeks ago, in an effort to accentuate the challenges of fast-food jobs, labor-union organizers published several screen grabs taken off a McDonald’s corporate website, McResourceline.com. The site, which is now unavailable, was designed to offer financial tips to a cash-poor work force. Despite its good intentions, it read like a Dickensian satire, counseling employees to break their meals into pieces (which “results in eating less and still feeling full”); to take two vacations a year (“can cut heart attack risk by 50%”); and to sell “unwanted possessions on eBay or Craigslist” for extra income.
In a statement, McDonald’s said, “This is an attempt by an outside organization to undermine a well-intended employee-assistance website by taking isolated portions out of context.”
The union organizers’ publishing of the website details came only four months after a sample McBudget that McDonald’s had prepared for its employees went viral on the Internet. The budget, which the company eventually amended, at first failed to include basic staples, like food and clothing, and earmarked only $20 a month for health-insurance payments.
Tellingly, there were two separate entries in the column labeled “Monthly Net Income”: one was for a first job (presumably at McDonald’s); the other was for an evidently necessary second.
Mr. Shoy found his fast-food job five years ago when someone mentioned having seen a help-wanted sign in the window of a KFC/Pizza Hut on Fresh Pond Road. Two years later, after his wife had to leave her own job and the couple realized that they could not survive on the minimum wage, and the occasional tip, Mr. Shoy started moonlighting at the airport.
“People ask me how I do it,” he said one morning, leaving Kennedy with a few hours to spare before he had to report to his delivery job. “But you do what you have to do. Otherwise I’d be living under the Williamsburg Bridge.”
It was troubles like these that he discussed with the organizer who initially persuaded him to join the union movement, Gregory Reynoso, a former worker at a Domino’s Pizza in Brooklyn who joined Fast Food Forward last spring. The movement itself started in late 2011, when activists from a group called New York Communities for Change — a spinoff of the defunct Acorn organization, started to receive complaints about the fast-food business from residents of Flatbush, Brownsville and Crown Heights, Brooklyn, while working there to stop a series of highly contentious public school closings.
The group, which had already organized workers at carwashes and supermarkets, repeatedly heard that the fast-food industry was a larger problem than either of those, said Mr. Westin, the executive director. Fast food not only employed more people in the neighborhoods, the residents said, but its pay and workplace conditions were arguably worse.
According to Mr. Westin, it was no accident that the effort started in New York.
“I think New York got the worst of the recession,” he said. “Folks here not only lost their jobs, and not only were the jobs created in their place low-wage jobs. In the city, rent and real estate prices — unlike in other places — kept going up.
“People were unhappy, they were struggling,” Mr. Westin went on. “Some weren’t eating multiple meals a day; others were sleeping in their cars. We understood that if we wanted to create real change, we had to look at the bigger picture — and the bigger picture was fast food.”
Within a matter of months, New York Communities for Change had assembled several partners for its organizing effort: UnitedNY.org, the Black Institute and, perhaps most important, the S.E.I.U.
Conscious of its predecessors’ failures, the coalition rejected the typical approach of filing federal grievances, calling news conferences and gathering on the steps of City Hall, and instead chose a more aggressive tactic: the roaming one-day strike. The strategy was influenced by Occupy Wall Street’s success in inserting the trope of the 1 percent into the national conversation, said Mr. Westin, a former Occupier himself. “Confronting power more openly and publicly and directly,” he added, “that came straight from Occupy.”
Melissa Autilio Fleischut, the chief executive of the New York State Restaurant Association, which supports the industry, including fast-food establishments, said that fast food was “an opportunity industry” where young workers could learn skills and advance. If the minimum wage were indeed raised to $15, Ms. Fleischut, said the result would be more automation, fewer workers hired and increased costs at the counter. “McDonald’s dollar meal would be $1.25,” she said.
At the end of August, the movement scored a success when Thomas Perez, the United States secretary of labor, mentioned the strikes in an interview with The Associated Press, calling them a reason to raise the minimum wage. That wasn’t long after Mr. Reynoso persuaded Mr. Shoy to go to Union Square, in Manhattan, for one of the campaign’s public protests. Mr. Shoy returned to his day job energized by the event. “We let them know how we were feeling,” he said. “The restaurants are making all the money. The worker isn’t getting no money at all.”
Though he didn’t make it to the other protests over the summer, he is planning to attend Fast Food Forward’s next action.
“We’ll see,” Mr. Reynoso said. “He’s busy.”
●
IN THE LAST TWO years, Mr. Shoy has put 30,000 miles on his Civic — most of them in repetitious five-to-10-mile spurts. His delivery job takes him on an endless circuit of strip clubs, auto-body shops and brick-faced apartment buildings in Ridgewood, Maspeth and Middle Village. He is paid $1.20 for each delivery to help defray his fuel costs. Despite the pine-tree air freshener dangling from its door, his car is stained with an abiding stench of grease.
A couple of weeks ago, during the lunch rush, Mr. Shoy hurried from the Petro Gas Company on 58th Street to the loading bays of a Western Beef grocery store in a clankingly surreal industrial park near the Kosciuszko Bridge. Then it was on to a series of row homes and apartments. On a good day, Mr. Shoy can make up to $75 in tips. Friday was not a good day.
Thursday is the one day he has off, and so, on Thanksgiving, Mr. Shoy was planning to get into his car again and drive the two hours to Pennsylvania to see his family. There would be hugs and conversation; his usual favorite dinner — baked chicken — would be replaced by turkey. Normally, in between the business of reunion on these trips, he manages to sneak away for an hour or so to nap.
He needs it. Work comes early — and, of course, stays late — Friday morning.
Bad Eating Habits Start in the Womb
http://nyti.ms/1eEWml3
THE solution to one of America’s most vexing problems — our soaring rates of obesity and diet-related diseases — may have its roots in early childhood, and even in utero.
Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit research organization in Philadelphia, have found that babies born to mothers who eat a diverse and varied diet while pregnant and breast-feeding are more open to a wide range of flavors. They’ve also found that babies who follow that diet after weaning carry those preferences into childhood and adulthood. Researchers believe that the taste preferences that develop at crucial periods in infancy have lasting effects for life. In fact, changing food preferences beyond toddlerhood appears to be extremely difficult.
“What’s really interesting about children is, the preferences they form during the first years of life actually predict what they’ll eat later,” said Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist and researcher at the Monell Center. “Dietary patterns track from early to later childhood but once they are formed, once they get older, it’s really difficult to change — witness how hard it is to change the adult. You can, but it’s just harder. Where you start, is where you end up.”
This may have profound implications for the future health of Americans. With some 70 percent of the United States population now overweight or obese and chronic diseases skyrocketing, many parents who are eating a diet high in processed, refined foods are feeding their babies as they feed themselves, and could be setting their children up for a lifetime of preferences for a narrow range of flavors.
The Monell researchers have identified several sensitive periods for taste preference development. One is before three and a half months of age, which makes what the mother eats while pregnant and breast-feeding so important. “It’s our fundamental belief that during evolution, we as humans are exposed to flavors both in utero and via mother’s milk that are signals of things that will be in our diets as we grow up and learn about what flavors are acceptable based on those experiences,” said Gary Beauchamp, the director of the Monell Center. “Infants exposed to a variety of flavors in infancy are more willing to accept a variety of flavors, including flavors that are associated with various vegetables and so forth and that might lead to a more healthy eating style later on.”
There is another reason these exposures have a lifelong impact, he said: “This early exposure leads to an imprinting-like phenomenon such that those flavors are not only preferred but they take on an emotional attachment.”
This puts babies fed formula at a disadvantage because the flavors in packaged formula never change. But according to Ms. Mennella, the opportunity to expose those babies to a range of flavors is not lost. “Just because you’re formula-fed, it’s not hopeless,” she said. “Babies learn through repeated exposure, so the more varied the diet, the more likely they’ll be to accept a novel food.”
Another recent study conducted at the FoodPlus research center at the University of Adelaide in South Australia found that exposure to a maternal junk food diet (defined in the study as any food that was energy dense, highly palatable and had a high fat content) results in children with a preference for these same foods. In a rodent model, the study found that being exposed to too much junk food in utero and through breast milk leads offspring to develop a reward pathway in the brain that is less sensitive than normal. Mothers who were fed foods like Froot Loops, Cheetos and Nutella during pregnancy had offspring that showed increased expression of the gene for an opioid receptor, which resulted in a desensitization to sweet and fatty foods. “The best way to think about how having a desensitized reward pathway would affect you is to use the analogy of somebody who is addicted to drugs,” Jessica R. Gugusheff, a Ph.D. candidate at FoodPlus and the lead author of the study, wrote in an email. “When someone is addicted to drugs they become less sensitive to the effects of that drug, so they have to increase the dose to get the same high,” she wrote. “In a similar way, by having a desensitized reward pathway, offspring exposed to junk food before birth have to eat more junk food to get the same good feelings.”
Ms. Mennella at Monell has also done research on reward pathways for sweetness and has found that sweet flavors have an analgesic effect on babies and children such that babies will cry less and children will leave their hand in a cold water bath for longer periods with sweet flavors in their mouths. Ms. Mennella has also found that in obese children, while the level of sweet they prefer is the same as that of normal-weight children, sweet flavors are not as effective as an analgesic. “I hypothesized maybe it’s because of some disruption in the opioid system, so maybe they need more sweet to get the same effect,” she said.
These research studies call into question the ethics of marketing poor-quality foods to children as well as the marketing of infant formula.
In the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 15 percent of mothers breast-feed exclusively for six months, with rates significantly lower for African-American mothers. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that women breast-feed exclusively for at least six months and then continue some breast-feeding as they introduce solid foods for the next six months. The World Health Organization recommends breast-feeding up to 2 years of age or beyond.
But infant formula is a booming billion-dollar industry with three companies controlling almost 98 percent of the market: Mead Johnson, maker of Enfamil, Abbott, manufacturer of Similac, and Nestlé (now Gerber), maker of Good Start.
Functional foods, or foods that allegedly deliver nutritional benefit beyond what is available in natural foods, are a food industry creation to convince consumers that their products are superior to, or can replace, natural, whole foods. Globally, infant formula is the fastest growing functional food; the market is on track to grow by nearly $5 billion in 2013 alone.
But formula is only part of the problem since breast-fed babies of mothers eating too many refined and processed foods are also at risk. Claims by the food industry that personal responsibility, exercising more, and eating less are the solutions to obesity and diet-related disease are turned on their head with these studies. If babies are developing food preferences in utero and before 2 or 3 years of age through no fault of their own, how can we then blame them when they become obese children and adults?
If we hope to reverse the tide on obesity and diet-related disease in America, regulating processed food products and infant formula, and creating clear warning labels to deter parents from feeding their children potentially harmful foods may be our best shot. Let’s make sure future generations have the best chance to become healthy adults.
Where Factory Apprenticeship Is Latest Model From Germany
http://nyti.ms/1eJLrHB
GREER, S.C. — For Joerg Klisch, hiring the first 60 workers to build heavy engines at his company’s new factory in South Carolina was easy. Finding the next 60 was not so simple.
“It seemed like we had sucked up everybody who knew about diesel engines,” said Mr. Klisch, vice president for North American operations of Tognum America. “It wasn’t working as we had planned.”
So Mr. Klisch did what he would have done back home in Germany: He set out to train them himself. Working with five local high schools and a career center in Aiken County, S.C. — and a curriculum nearly identical to the one at the company’s headquarters in Friedrichshafen — Tognum now has nine juniors and seniors enrolled in its apprenticeship program.
Inspired by a partnership between schools and industry that is seen as a key to Germany’s advanced industrial capability and relatively low unemployment rate, projects like the one at Tognum are practically unheard-of in the United States.
But experts in government and academia, along with those inside companies like BMW, which has its only American factory in South Carolina, say apprenticeships are a desperately needed option for younger workers who want decent-paying jobs, or increasingly, any job at all. And without more programs like the one at Tognum, they maintain, the nascent recovery in American manufacturing will run out of steam for lack of qualified workers.
“South Carolina offers a fantastic model for what we can do nationally,” said Ben Olinsky, co-author of a forthcoming report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington research organization, recommending a vast expansion in apprenticeships.
Despite South Carolina’s progress and the public support for apprenticeships from President Obama, who cited the German model in his last State of the Union address, these positions are becoming harder to find in other states. Since 2008, the number of apprentices has fallen by nearly 40 percent, according to the Center for American Progress study.
“As a nation, over the course of the last couple of decades, we have regrettably and mistakenly devalued apprenticeships and training,” said Thomas E. Perez, the secretary of labor. “We need to change that, and you will hear the president talk a lot about it in the weeks and months ahead.”
In November, the White House announced a new $100 million grant program aimed at advancing technical training in high schools. But veteran apprenticeship advocates say the Obama administration has been slow to act.
“The results have not matched the rhetoric in terms of direct funding for apprenticeships so far,” said Robert Lerman, a professor of economics at American University in Washington. “I’m hoping for a new push.”
In Germany, apprentices divide their time between classroom training in a public vocational school and practical training at a company or small firm. Some 330 types of apprenticeships are accredited by the government in Berlin, including such jobs as hairdresser, roofer and automobile electronics specialist. About 60 percent of German high school students go through some kind of apprenticeship program, which leads to a formal certificate in the chosen skill and often a permanent job at the company where the young person trained.
If there is a downside to the German system, it is that it can be inflexible, because a person trained in a specific skill may find it difficult to switch vocations if demand shifts.
In South Carolina, apprenticeships are mainly funded by employers, but the state introduced a four-year, annual tax credit of $1,000 per position in 2007 that proved to be a boon for small- to medium-size companies. The Center for American Progress report recommends a similar credit nationwide that would rise to $2,000 for apprentices under age 25.
The emphasis on job training has also been a major calling card overseas for South Carolina officials, who lured BMW here two decades ago and more recently persuaded France’s Michelin and Germany’s Continental Tire to expand in the state.
“The European influence is huge,” said Brad Neese, director of Apprenticeship Carolina, which links the state’s technical college system with private companies to help create specialized programs. “They are our strongest partners.”
European companies are major employers in the state, with more than 28,000 workers for German companies alone. The influx has helped stanch much of the bleeding caused by the decades-long erosion of jobs in the textile industry, once the economic bulwark of the Palmetto state.
Of course, there are other reasons foreign companies have moved here. For starters, wages are lower than the national average. Even more important for many manufacturers, unions have made few inroads in South Carolina.
Still, the close cooperation between employers and the state educational system is unusual, and despite initial skepticism on both sides, apprenticeship opportunities are rapidly expanding both for high-school age students and for older workers.
Apprenticeship Carolina started in 2007 with 777 students at 90 companies. It now has 4,500 students at more than 600 companies in the state, with the typical apprentice in his or her late 20s. Mr. Neese’s goal is to have 2,000 companies by 2020.
To help develop his program, Mr. Neese has traveled to Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where apprenticeships are thriving, youth unemployment is relatively low and blue-collar jobs are still prized. That contrasts with the United States, where the economic fortunes of younger people with just a high school diploma have plummeted, and the unemployment rate among workers age 16 to 19 stands at more than 20 percent.
“This generation has taken a huge hit from the economic crisis,” said Alexander Gelber, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley and a former senior Treasury official. “Apprenticeships offer people the possibility of building skills when they often don’t have many other options.”
So why have they not caught on in the United States like in Germany, which has 1.8 million apprentices with less than one-third the population?
Besides a longstanding stigma attached to vocational education, opposition from entrenched interests on both the left and the right has hobbled past efforts to promote apprenticeships, including under President Clinton in the 1990s.
Joerg Klisch discovered this firsthand when he started seeking support for the program in 2011.
School officials were wary of allowing a private company to dictate the curriculum. Meanwhile, among employers, “there seems to be a perception that apprenticeship means unions,” Mr. Klisch said. “It doesn’t, but we have to overcome this hurdle.”
Here in Greer, where more than 7,000 employees produce over 300,000 S.U.V.’s and other luxury cars a year in a sprawling, ultramodern BMW factory, Richard Morris, vice president for assembly and logistics, identifies one of the company’s biggest problems: a serious shortage of medium-skilled workers who specialize in mechatronics, or repairing robots and metal presses when they break down and operating the computers that dot the paint shop, body shop and assembly shop. Not only do these jobs pay better than typical assembly-line positions, they also open up avenues for advancement.
Werner Eikenbusch, manager of work force development for BMW in the Americas, is himself the product of an apprenticeship program in Germany who later went back to school and earned a master’s degree in engineering. He helped create the BMW Scholars program in 2011, he said, “to build the skills from the ground up.”
The BMW Scholars are older than Tognum’s apprentices — mostly in their 20s and 30s — and they study full-time at local technical colleges for two years while also working in the BMW factory for 20 hours a week.
“It is a struggle, but if you know how to manage the time, it is not hard,” said Benjamin Peoples, a 27-year-old BMW Scholar who dropped out of Clemson University a few years ago because he could no longer afford it. “I wanted to work with my hands and with machines, but I didn’t have experience with robots.”
Mr. Eikenbusch has been pitching the program to European parts suppliers in the area, as well as to executives at Boeing, which began building sections of the new 787 Dreamliner in Charleston in 2011. He hopes they will follow BMW’s lead.
“We need to find a way to establish two-year training programs on a broader scale,” he said. “Everybody who I hire is someone who is not available for our suppliers to hire.”
In Subways, Suddenly, 2 Glimpses of History
http://nyti.ms/1c1f8zY
One is a century-old transit hub permitted to age gracefully beneath Lower Manhattan, its chandeliers, terra-cotta tiles and ceiling of Guastavino vaults carefully preserved.
The other is the subway system’s forgotten shame, cast in blue spray paint and corrugated metal, then suspended in disrepair since the grime-and-graffiti era of the 1970s, when it served a neighborhood in Brooklyn that bears little resemblance to today’s.
There are more than a few stations hidden in the city’s underground thickets, but none offer more contrasting images of New York’s past than these two: Old City Hall Station, the flagship of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, and the lower level at Bergen Street, last seen widely as the backdrop of a horror film.
Now, for equally divergent reasons involving train turnarounds and the vicissitudes of repair, both can be glimpsed for those who know where to look. The first case is deliberate: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has in recent years begun allowing riders to stay on the No. 6 train as it turns around at the southern end of its run. The second is not. In the last several months, planned and unplanned work on the Culver Line in Brooklyn has often rerouted F trains to the old express tracks that pass below Cobble Hill.
Among history-minded riders, the stations have for decades stood as emblems of the transit system’s dueling legacies. They are the impossible standard and the indelible blight — the reason today’s wistful older riders can be sorted into two camps: those for whom hindsight has softened the edges of the subway’s darkest days, and the dwindling few with memories long enough to include its most regal beginnings.
The stations are particularly striking because they can be glimpsed almost accidentally, by a straggler who overslept on the Lexington Avenue line, waking to discover a turn-of-the-century gem on the loop track at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall, or by a commuter aboard a surprise express to Manhattan.
For such F train riders, there is the dash past the outdoor stations at Fourth Avenue and Smith-Ninth Street, then the telltale dip at Carroll Street, as the platform recedes overhead.
And then it appears, faintly at first, followed by two surges of light: the moldering columns, a staircase leading to a dim concourse, and walls of graffiti — some fresh, some apparently decades old. The station was closed to passengers in 1976.
“It’s sort of a window back into that time when the subway system was different, and not nearly as safe,” said Benjamin Kabak, the publisher of the website Second Ave. Sagas, who recently passed the old station during a spell of weekend work on the F. “It looked like the train could stop and let people on right now.”
But few chapters from the system’s past so rankle the transportation authority, which declined to discuss the station in detail. For one, the authority is mindful of persistent calls to restore F express service in Brooklyn, fearing that any mention of the station might convince riders that it could be renovated adequately. Officials also noted security concerns and a desire to “discourage urban explorers” from venturing underground.
At City Hall, though, a sense of adventure is celebrated. On the authority’s website, members of the New York Transit Museum are encouraged to buy $40 tickets for a tour of the station, referred to by its nickname, “the Jewel in the Crown.” There are two sessions in December.
For the 100th anniversary of the subway system in 2004, the station, which was closed in 1945 because its platforms could not accommodate 10-car trains, was reopened for a ceremony with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Workers dressed in turn-of-the-century outfits, as Mr. Bloomberg helped maneuver a vintage four-car train.
Less elaborate outings have also been condoned. Though conductors were in the past known to expel passengers at the end of the No. 6 line, announcements on many trains have been adjusted to reflect a change. “The next stop on this train will be Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall, on the uptown platform,” the message now says, in a nod to riders who might remain on board. The cost for them, of course, is that of a single ride.
Even the pace of the train is cooperative, at least compared with the express-powered blur past Bergen Street. A recent, unhurried rumble through the loop revealed the skylights, the faience signs, the arched entryway illuminated by six temporary bulbs.
“It’s a salute to an era when subways were meant to enhance the quality of life in the city,” said Gene Russianoff, a longtime transit advocate for the Straphangers Campaign. “I guess they do now, but not with beautiful stations.”
On a recent afternoon, Bersio Pupo, 46, and Yara Noronha, 31, visiting from Brazil, said they had come to the station after seeing images of it in a book of photographs. It reminded them of Estação da Luz in São Paulo.
But it is possible that today’s Bergen Street guests have the stronger grasp of the system’s past. One veteran graffiti writer, who requested anonymity because he is not allowed to traverse the tunnels, said he had visited the lower level three times in recent years to take in the art and add his own. “The people who end up there are usually people who know their history,” he said.
The Brooklyn station received perhaps its widest exposure in 1990, as the setting of a scene in “Jacob’s Ladder,” starring Tim Robbins as a troubled Vietnam War veteran. That is thought to be perhaps the last time the station was opened for anyone besides transit personnel.
Adrian Lyne, the film’s director, said in a phone interview that the hub had thrived in its supporting role. “It worked very well for me,” he recalled. “It’s a rather ghostly place.”
Why are we more scared of raw egg than reheated rice?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25154046
http://nyti.ms/1eDASVX
HONG KONG — China’s latest display of ambition in space involves sending a Jade Rabbit roaming across the Bay of Rainbows.
A rocket blasted off from southwest China early Monday, carrying the country’s first robotic lunar rover, the Jade Rabbit, which will explore a plain on the moon that, despite its colorful name, is a dark expanse of hardened lava.
If successful, the Chang’e-3 mission will be China’s first “soft landing” on the moon — which allows a craft to operate after descending — and the first such landing by any country since 1976, when the Soviet Union sent a probe. The United States is the other country that has mastered soft lunar landings, and the last American expedition on the moon’s surface was a manned visit in 1972. Chinese state-run television broadcast footage of the rocket’s untroubled launch and ascent into space, where the Chang’e-3 craft set off toward the moon.
For China’s Communist Party under President Xi Jinping, such feats embody his rallying cry of a “Chinese dream” of patriotic unity under one-party rule, supported by technological advances and rising international stature.
“If it’s all successful, it will certainly indicate that they have really come up the learning curve in terms of technology,” said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College in Rhode Island who researches China’s space activities. Professor Johnson-Freese emphasized that she was giving her own views.
“China’s getting a lot of prestige, which turns into geostrategic influence, from the fact that they are the third country to have manned spaceflight capabilities, that they are going to the moon,” she said.
The Chinese state-run news media has responded to the launch from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center with jubilation. That is likely to reach a climax in about two weeks, when the landing vehicle is scheduled to descend on the moon and release the Jade Rabbit, or Yutu, robotic rover to start sending back data and pictures from Sinus Iridum, or the Bay of Rainbows, a basaltic plain formed from lava that filled a crater.
But as well as patriotic pride, China’s space activities are generating skills to enhance the country’s science, satellites and military, experts said. China’s advances in space include five manned flights, which are intended to pave the way for a space station. The country is also developing an array of new satellites, including the BeiDou navigation system that will have a chain of 35 satellites. Many of the advances used for better rockets and space guidance can be applied in missiles.
“Simple prestige is certainly a key driver in a lot of China’s space programs, in particular the manned space program,” said Mark Stokes, the executive director of the Project 2049 Institute, a research organization in Washington focused on security issues in Asia. “It’s also a way to mobilize resources and to concentrate resources in a way that could result in certain types of spinoff technologies.”
Above all, China has been learning how to orchestrate complicated engineering tasks and to surmount the poor bureaucratic coordination that has often frustrated such efforts, said Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington who has studied China’s space programs.
“We in the U.S., in the West, tend to focus on the widget aspect of China’s space progress,” Mr. Cheng said. “But I would say that what we sometimes miss is how important these organizational changes are. All the Chinese space efforts are efforts at improving their systems engineering.”
China’s military drives the country’s space program, and that has caused wariness among Western governments. Suspicions have been magnified by allegations that China has stolen information for its space and missile programs. Congress passed a law in 2011 that bans the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from developing bilateral contacts with China, although multilateral contacts are not proscribed.
But China’s program has reached a point where deeper cooperation with the United States or Russia would make little difference, said Gregory Kulacki, China project manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists. He nonetheless supports closer contacts to foster cooperation and reduce mistrust. “They don’t really need to rely on any outside sources to continue to make the progress that they’re making,” Mr. Kulacki said.
China established a foothold in space in 1970, when a small, primitive satellite beamed back an ode to Mao Zedong, “The East is Red.” From the 1980s, the Communist Party leadership began to develop bigger plans, and in 2003, China sent its first astronaut into space. China has since carried out four more manned missions.
The Chang’e lunar exploration program, named after a moon goddess, began in 2007 with a craft that orbited the moon, and the Cheng’e-2 mission launched in 2010 sent back more detailed images of the moon, including of the area where Chang’e-3 will land. (The Chang’e-1 craft hurtled into the moon in a controlled, hard landing in 2009.)
For the Chang’e-3 mission, the rover — a solar-powered, six-wheeled vehicle similar to ones the United States has sent to Mars — will spend three months exploring and collecting data. A future mission that could take place in several years would be intended to bring back rocks and other samples from the moon. The Chinese government said in 2011 it was also studying sending an astronaut to the moon, but that remains a distant prospect.
Wage Strikes Planned at Fast-Food Outlets
http://nyti.ms/1eECNcP
December 1, 2013
Wage Strikes Planned at Fast-Food Outlets
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Seeking to increase pressure on McDonald’s, Wendy’s and other fast-food restaurants, organizers of a movement demanding a $15-an-hour wage for fast-food workers say they will sponsor one-day strikes in 100 cities on Thursday and protest activities in 100 additional cities.
As the movement struggles to find pressure points in its quest for substantially higher wages for workers, organizers said strikes were planned for the first time in cities like Charleston, S.C.; Providence, R.I.; and Pittsburgh.
The protests have expanded greatly since November 2012, when 200 fast-food workers engaged in a one-day strike at more than 20 restaurants in New York City, the first such walkout in the history of the nation’s fast-food industry.
“There’s been pretty huge growth in one year,” said Kendall Fells, one of the movement’s main organizers. “People understand that a one-day strike is not going to get them there. They understand that this needs to continue to grow.”
The movement, which includes the groups Fast Food Forward and Fight for 15, is part of a growing union-backed effort by low-paid workers — including many Walmart workers and workers for federal contractors — that seeks to focus attention on what the groups say are inadequate wages.
The fast-food effort is backed by the Service Employees International Union and is also demanding that restaurants allow workers to unionize without the threat of retaliation.
Officials with the National Restaurant Association have said the one-day strikes are publicity stunts. They warn that increasing pay to $15 an hour when the federal minimum wage is $7.25 would cause restaurants to rely more on automation and hire fewer workers.
Industry officials say that only a small percentage of fast-food jobs pay the minimum wage and that those are largely entry-level jobs for workers under 25.
Backers of the movement for higher pay point to studies saying that the average age of fast-food workers is 29 and that more than one-fourth are parents raising children.
Simon Rojas, who earns $8.07 an hour working at a McDonald’s in South Central Los Angeles, said he would join Thursday’s one-day strike.
“It’s very difficult to live off $8.07 an hour,” said Mr. Rojas, 23, noting that he is often assigned just 20 or 25 hours of work a week. “I have to live with my parents. I would like to be able to afford a car and an apartment.”
Mr. Rojas said he had studied for a pharmacy technician’s certificate, but he had been unable to save the $100 needed to apply for a license.
On Aug. 29, fast-food strikes took place in more than 50 cities. This week’s expanded protests will be joined by numerous community, faith and student groups, including USAction and United Students against Sweatshops.
Older Workers Are Increasingly Entering Fast-Food Industry
http://nyti.ms/1bZuVPW
On a recent Friday evening, Eduardo Shoy left work at 6 p.m. Mr. Shoy, a deliveryman for KFC and Pizza Hut, was coming off an eight-hour shift of driving three-cheese pies and crispy chicken fingers, in an automotive blur, to private homes and businesses in central Queens.
Now it was the weekend and he was headed home. He parked his car in the little alley lot behind his house and, passing through the door, he kicked his shoes off, donned a pair of slippers and prepared a mug of tea. He sat down with his television set and ate the box of chicken he had brought back from the restaurant. Within an hour, remote control beside him, still dressed in his uniform, he had drifted off to sleep.
If Mr. Shoy were differently employed, he might have remained that way till morning. But as a fast-food worker paid the minimum wage — $7.25 an hour in New York — he didn’t have the luxury. At 10 p.m., he was up again and back in his car, this time driving to his second job, as a forklift operator at Kennedy International Airport, where he makes $13 an hour. Having worked all day, he was about to work all night: from 11 p.m. until 7:30 a.m. At 3 that afternoon, he would return to his deliveries at the restaurant. Then, at 11, he would once again drive to the airport.
Altogether, on the weekend before Thanksgiving, Mr. Shoy would sleep for 13 hours and work for 44. “Tired?” he asked, sounding puzzled by the question. “I’m too busy to be tired.”
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THERE ARE 55,000 fast-food workers in New York — more than the entire population of Harrisburg, Pa. — and most, like Mr. Shoy, are struggling to stitch together a living in an industry where the median wage is $8.90 an hour. Last year, fast-food workers in Manhattan earned average pay of $19,000 — or about the cost of Mr. Shoy’s Honda. In Brooklyn, it was $15,500; on Staten Island, less.
Since 2000, the number of fast-food jobs in New York City has increased by more than 50 percent — 10 times as fast as in any other type of private job. But the conspicuous increase has not received the attention given, say, to the city’s high-tech industry, nor has it lessened the financial insecurities of this growing work force.
According to a study released in October, only 13 percent of fast-food workers get health-insurance benefits at work. In New York State, three in five have received some form of government assistance in the last five years. Meanwhile, executive pay and profits in the industry are on the rise. Last winter, Bloomberg News determined that it would take a Chicago McDonald’s worker who earns $8.25 an hour more than a century on the clock to match the $8.75 million that the company’s chief executive made in 2011.
The classic image of the high-school student flipping Big Macs after class is sorely out of date. Because of lingering unemployment and a relative abundance of fast-food jobs, older workers are increasingly entering the industry. These days, according to the National Employment Law Project, the average age of fast-food workers is 29. Forty percent are 25 or older; 31 percent have at least attempted college; more than 26 percent are parents raising children. Union organizers say that one-third to one-half of them have more than one job — like Mr. Shoy, who is 58 and supports a wife and children.
The fast-food industry says that what is going on here is a structural anomaly: that its wages were not intended to sustain a permanent work force — especially adults supporting families — and that it is happening because of larger economic forces. “The minimum wage was never meant to be a living wage,” said Steve Caldeira, the president of the International Franchise Association, a trade group for restaurants and other franchised firms. “It was meant, from the start, for entry-level workers and for those with lower skills.”
Traditionally, the fast-food industry has proved resistant to unionization. There is no one central employer against whom to strike, because most of the restaurants are franchised. McDonald’s and Burger King alone have tens of thousands of locations across the country. And until very recently, the demographic nature of the workers themselves was also a problem: many, as the industry said, were youthful transients and proved difficult to organize at job sites they were likely to leave.
But a year ago last week, the largest series of strikes against the fast-food industry in American history began in New York City. The protests started at a McDonald’s at Madison Avenue and 40th Street, where scores of angry workers stood in front of the familiar golden arches, waving signs and chanting rhyming slogans. By the end of the day, workers at dozens of franchised restaurants — Burger Kings, Taco Bells, Wendy’s and the like — had walked off the job, in an action that concluded with a rally outside a McDonald’s in Times Square.
Working under the name Fast Food Forward and funded by a giant labor group, the Service Employees International Union, the organizers set a pair of goals — to unionize the industry and to make demands for a $15 minimum wage — and began an unusual campaign of one-day flash strikes. The strategy caught on. Last April, five months after the first strike in New York, the fast-food actions — now with the umbrella name Fight for 15 (for the $15 wage demand) — spread to cities such as Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Seattle and Kansas City. Over the summer, thousands more fast-food workers took to the streets in nearly 50 municipalities, including Memphis and Raleigh, N.C., in the traditionally union-resistant South.
In New York, the recent elections resulted in the city’s three top positions — mayor, public advocate and comptroller — all being filled by supporters of the campaign, while the incoming City Council could be among the most union-friendly in decades, said Jonathan Westin, an organizer of the movement here. Mr. Westin also said support for a higher minimum wage was slowly growing among state lawmakers in Albany.
There was another sign of the movement’s growth — small, but not insignificant — that went unnoticed in the noisy play of politics.
Eduardo Shoy, a man too busy to sleep for more than four hours a night, made time this summer to attend his first strike.
●
MR. SHOY IS NOT what one would call a radical man. Quiet, industrious and unyieldingly easygoing, he joined the fast-food movement only after watching himself and his family descend from what seemed like a once-secure position in the middle class.
In 2008, when he was 53, Mr. Shoy lost his job driving forklifts at a warehouse on Long Island owned by the Waldbaum’s grocery-store chain. His salary at the job, which he had had for more than 20 years, was $22 an hour, and came with overtime and benefits, he said. His wife, Elana, worked as a waitress until three years ago, when she tore a ligament in her knee and had to quit. In 2003, before any of that had happened, the couple bought a house for more than $500,000 — a comfortable three-bedroom on a quiet street in Middle Village, Queens.
Now the house is almost empty, devoid of furniture except for a couch, a table and the bed wedged between them in the basement, where Mr. Shoy sleeps these days, alone. Two months ago, his wife and children — Eduardo Jr., 22, and Leslie, 19 — moved to Pennsylvania, where Leslie plans to enter college next year (with the help of financial aid) and where Eduardo Jr. works in a warehouse for Amazon.com. Mr. Shoy has remained behind, doing what he calls “the bachelor thing — working,” until he manages to sell the house that he can no longer afford.
“I thought I’d spend my life here,” he said the other day, standing in the vacancy that used to be his living room. “The way I had it planned, I’d be retired by now: full pension, Social Security. But things turned out a little different in the end. You do the best you can.”
Working more than 70 hours a week between his two jobs, Mr. Shoy makes a quasi-livable income: about $43,000 a year. But out of that, he has to pay his mortgage, his utilities, his car lease, his car insurance premiums and his children’s car insurance premiums, and then write a check each month to help them with their rent.
“Whatever comes first, I pay first,” he said.
Just two weeks ago, in an effort to accentuate the challenges of fast-food jobs, labor-union organizers published several screen grabs taken off a McDonald’s corporate website, McResourceline.com. The site, which is now unavailable, was designed to offer financial tips to a cash-poor work force. Despite its good intentions, it read like a Dickensian satire, counseling employees to break their meals into pieces (which “results in eating less and still feeling full”); to take two vacations a year (“can cut heart attack risk by 50%”); and to sell “unwanted possessions on eBay or Craigslist” for extra income.
In a statement, McDonald’s said, “This is an attempt by an outside organization to undermine a well-intended employee-assistance website by taking isolated portions out of context.”
The union organizers’ publishing of the website details came only four months after a sample McBudget that McDonald’s had prepared for its employees went viral on the Internet. The budget, which the company eventually amended, at first failed to include basic staples, like food and clothing, and earmarked only $20 a month for health-insurance payments.
Tellingly, there were two separate entries in the column labeled “Monthly Net Income”: one was for a first job (presumably at McDonald’s); the other was for an evidently necessary second.
Mr. Shoy found his fast-food job five years ago when someone mentioned having seen a help-wanted sign in the window of a KFC/Pizza Hut on Fresh Pond Road. Two years later, after his wife had to leave her own job and the couple realized that they could not survive on the minimum wage, and the occasional tip, Mr. Shoy started moonlighting at the airport.
“People ask me how I do it,” he said one morning, leaving Kennedy with a few hours to spare before he had to report to his delivery job. “But you do what you have to do. Otherwise I’d be living under the Williamsburg Bridge.”
It was troubles like these that he discussed with the organizer who initially persuaded him to join the union movement, Gregory Reynoso, a former worker at a Domino’s Pizza in Brooklyn who joined Fast Food Forward last spring. The movement itself started in late 2011, when activists from a group called New York Communities for Change — a spinoff of the defunct Acorn organization, started to receive complaints about the fast-food business from residents of Flatbush, Brownsville and Crown Heights, Brooklyn, while working there to stop a series of highly contentious public school closings.
The group, which had already organized workers at carwashes and supermarkets, repeatedly heard that the fast-food industry was a larger problem than either of those, said Mr. Westin, the executive director. Fast food not only employed more people in the neighborhoods, the residents said, but its pay and workplace conditions were arguably worse.
According to Mr. Westin, it was no accident that the effort started in New York.
“I think New York got the worst of the recession,” he said. “Folks here not only lost their jobs, and not only were the jobs created in their place low-wage jobs. In the city, rent and real estate prices — unlike in other places — kept going up.
“People were unhappy, they were struggling,” Mr. Westin went on. “Some weren’t eating multiple meals a day; others were sleeping in their cars. We understood that if we wanted to create real change, we had to look at the bigger picture — and the bigger picture was fast food.”
Within a matter of months, New York Communities for Change had assembled several partners for its organizing effort: UnitedNY.org, the Black Institute and, perhaps most important, the S.E.I.U.
Conscious of its predecessors’ failures, the coalition rejected the typical approach of filing federal grievances, calling news conferences and gathering on the steps of City Hall, and instead chose a more aggressive tactic: the roaming one-day strike. The strategy was influenced by Occupy Wall Street’s success in inserting the trope of the 1 percent into the national conversation, said Mr. Westin, a former Occupier himself. “Confronting power more openly and publicly and directly,” he added, “that came straight from Occupy.”
Melissa Autilio Fleischut, the chief executive of the New York State Restaurant Association, which supports the industry, including fast-food establishments, said that fast food was “an opportunity industry” where young workers could learn skills and advance. If the minimum wage were indeed raised to $15, Ms. Fleischut, said the result would be more automation, fewer workers hired and increased costs at the counter. “McDonald’s dollar meal would be $1.25,” she said.
At the end of August, the movement scored a success when Thomas Perez, the United States secretary of labor, mentioned the strikes in an interview with The Associated Press, calling them a reason to raise the minimum wage. That wasn’t long after Mr. Reynoso persuaded Mr. Shoy to go to Union Square, in Manhattan, for one of the campaign’s public protests. Mr. Shoy returned to his day job energized by the event. “We let them know how we were feeling,” he said. “The restaurants are making all the money. The worker isn’t getting no money at all.”
Though he didn’t make it to the other protests over the summer, he is planning to attend Fast Food Forward’s next action.
“We’ll see,” Mr. Reynoso said. “He’s busy.”
●
IN THE LAST TWO years, Mr. Shoy has put 30,000 miles on his Civic — most of them in repetitious five-to-10-mile spurts. His delivery job takes him on an endless circuit of strip clubs, auto-body shops and brick-faced apartment buildings in Ridgewood, Maspeth and Middle Village. He is paid $1.20 for each delivery to help defray his fuel costs. Despite the pine-tree air freshener dangling from its door, his car is stained with an abiding stench of grease.
A couple of weeks ago, during the lunch rush, Mr. Shoy hurried from the Petro Gas Company on 58th Street to the loading bays of a Western Beef grocery store in a clankingly surreal industrial park near the Kosciuszko Bridge. Then it was on to a series of row homes and apartments. On a good day, Mr. Shoy can make up to $75 in tips. Friday was not a good day.
Thursday is the one day he has off, and so, on Thanksgiving, Mr. Shoy was planning to get into his car again and drive the two hours to Pennsylvania to see his family. There would be hugs and conversation; his usual favorite dinner — baked chicken — would be replaced by turkey. Normally, in between the business of reunion on these trips, he manages to sneak away for an hour or so to nap.
He needs it. Work comes early — and, of course, stays late — Friday morning.
Bad Eating Habits Start in the Womb
http://nyti.ms/1eEWml3
THE solution to one of America’s most vexing problems — our soaring rates of obesity and diet-related diseases — may have its roots in early childhood, and even in utero.
Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit research organization in Philadelphia, have found that babies born to mothers who eat a diverse and varied diet while pregnant and breast-feeding are more open to a wide range of flavors. They’ve also found that babies who follow that diet after weaning carry those preferences into childhood and adulthood. Researchers believe that the taste preferences that develop at crucial periods in infancy have lasting effects for life. In fact, changing food preferences beyond toddlerhood appears to be extremely difficult.
“What’s really interesting about children is, the preferences they form during the first years of life actually predict what they’ll eat later,” said Julie Mennella, a biopsychologist and researcher at the Monell Center. “Dietary patterns track from early to later childhood but once they are formed, once they get older, it’s really difficult to change — witness how hard it is to change the adult. You can, but it’s just harder. Where you start, is where you end up.”
This may have profound implications for the future health of Americans. With some 70 percent of the United States population now overweight or obese and chronic diseases skyrocketing, many parents who are eating a diet high in processed, refined foods are feeding their babies as they feed themselves, and could be setting their children up for a lifetime of preferences for a narrow range of flavors.
The Monell researchers have identified several sensitive periods for taste preference development. One is before three and a half months of age, which makes what the mother eats while pregnant and breast-feeding so important. “It’s our fundamental belief that during evolution, we as humans are exposed to flavors both in utero and via mother’s milk that are signals of things that will be in our diets as we grow up and learn about what flavors are acceptable based on those experiences,” said Gary Beauchamp, the director of the Monell Center. “Infants exposed to a variety of flavors in infancy are more willing to accept a variety of flavors, including flavors that are associated with various vegetables and so forth and that might lead to a more healthy eating style later on.”
There is another reason these exposures have a lifelong impact, he said: “This early exposure leads to an imprinting-like phenomenon such that those flavors are not only preferred but they take on an emotional attachment.”
This puts babies fed formula at a disadvantage because the flavors in packaged formula never change. But according to Ms. Mennella, the opportunity to expose those babies to a range of flavors is not lost. “Just because you’re formula-fed, it’s not hopeless,” she said. “Babies learn through repeated exposure, so the more varied the diet, the more likely they’ll be to accept a novel food.”
Another recent study conducted at the FoodPlus research center at the University of Adelaide in South Australia found that exposure to a maternal junk food diet (defined in the study as any food that was energy dense, highly palatable and had a high fat content) results in children with a preference for these same foods. In a rodent model, the study found that being exposed to too much junk food in utero and through breast milk leads offspring to develop a reward pathway in the brain that is less sensitive than normal. Mothers who were fed foods like Froot Loops, Cheetos and Nutella during pregnancy had offspring that showed increased expression of the gene for an opioid receptor, which resulted in a desensitization to sweet and fatty foods. “The best way to think about how having a desensitized reward pathway would affect you is to use the analogy of somebody who is addicted to drugs,” Jessica R. Gugusheff, a Ph.D. candidate at FoodPlus and the lead author of the study, wrote in an email. “When someone is addicted to drugs they become less sensitive to the effects of that drug, so they have to increase the dose to get the same high,” she wrote. “In a similar way, by having a desensitized reward pathway, offspring exposed to junk food before birth have to eat more junk food to get the same good feelings.”
Ms. Mennella at Monell has also done research on reward pathways for sweetness and has found that sweet flavors have an analgesic effect on babies and children such that babies will cry less and children will leave their hand in a cold water bath for longer periods with sweet flavors in their mouths. Ms. Mennella has also found that in obese children, while the level of sweet they prefer is the same as that of normal-weight children, sweet flavors are not as effective as an analgesic. “I hypothesized maybe it’s because of some disruption in the opioid system, so maybe they need more sweet to get the same effect,” she said.
These research studies call into question the ethics of marketing poor-quality foods to children as well as the marketing of infant formula.
In the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 15 percent of mothers breast-feed exclusively for six months, with rates significantly lower for African-American mothers. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that women breast-feed exclusively for at least six months and then continue some breast-feeding as they introduce solid foods for the next six months. The World Health Organization recommends breast-feeding up to 2 years of age or beyond.
But infant formula is a booming billion-dollar industry with three companies controlling almost 98 percent of the market: Mead Johnson, maker of Enfamil, Abbott, manufacturer of Similac, and Nestlé (now Gerber), maker of Good Start.
Functional foods, or foods that allegedly deliver nutritional benefit beyond what is available in natural foods, are a food industry creation to convince consumers that their products are superior to, or can replace, natural, whole foods. Globally, infant formula is the fastest growing functional food; the market is on track to grow by nearly $5 billion in 2013 alone.
But formula is only part of the problem since breast-fed babies of mothers eating too many refined and processed foods are also at risk. Claims by the food industry that personal responsibility, exercising more, and eating less are the solutions to obesity and diet-related disease are turned on their head with these studies. If babies are developing food preferences in utero and before 2 or 3 years of age through no fault of their own, how can we then blame them when they become obese children and adults?
If we hope to reverse the tide on obesity and diet-related disease in America, regulating processed food products and infant formula, and creating clear warning labels to deter parents from feeding their children potentially harmful foods may be our best shot. Let’s make sure future generations have the best chance to become healthy adults.
Where Factory Apprenticeship Is Latest Model From Germany
http://nyti.ms/1eJLrHB
GREER, S.C. — For Joerg Klisch, hiring the first 60 workers to build heavy engines at his company’s new factory in South Carolina was easy. Finding the next 60 was not so simple.
“It seemed like we had sucked up everybody who knew about diesel engines,” said Mr. Klisch, vice president for North American operations of Tognum America. “It wasn’t working as we had planned.”
So Mr. Klisch did what he would have done back home in Germany: He set out to train them himself. Working with five local high schools and a career center in Aiken County, S.C. — and a curriculum nearly identical to the one at the company’s headquarters in Friedrichshafen — Tognum now has nine juniors and seniors enrolled in its apprenticeship program.
Inspired by a partnership between schools and industry that is seen as a key to Germany’s advanced industrial capability and relatively low unemployment rate, projects like the one at Tognum are practically unheard-of in the United States.
But experts in government and academia, along with those inside companies like BMW, which has its only American factory in South Carolina, say apprenticeships are a desperately needed option for younger workers who want decent-paying jobs, or increasingly, any job at all. And without more programs like the one at Tognum, they maintain, the nascent recovery in American manufacturing will run out of steam for lack of qualified workers.
“South Carolina offers a fantastic model for what we can do nationally,” said Ben Olinsky, co-author of a forthcoming report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington research organization, recommending a vast expansion in apprenticeships.
Despite South Carolina’s progress and the public support for apprenticeships from President Obama, who cited the German model in his last State of the Union address, these positions are becoming harder to find in other states. Since 2008, the number of apprentices has fallen by nearly 40 percent, according to the Center for American Progress study.
“As a nation, over the course of the last couple of decades, we have regrettably and mistakenly devalued apprenticeships and training,” said Thomas E. Perez, the secretary of labor. “We need to change that, and you will hear the president talk a lot about it in the weeks and months ahead.”
In November, the White House announced a new $100 million grant program aimed at advancing technical training in high schools. But veteran apprenticeship advocates say the Obama administration has been slow to act.
“The results have not matched the rhetoric in terms of direct funding for apprenticeships so far,” said Robert Lerman, a professor of economics at American University in Washington. “I’m hoping for a new push.”
In Germany, apprentices divide their time between classroom training in a public vocational school and practical training at a company or small firm. Some 330 types of apprenticeships are accredited by the government in Berlin, including such jobs as hairdresser, roofer and automobile electronics specialist. About 60 percent of German high school students go through some kind of apprenticeship program, which leads to a formal certificate in the chosen skill and often a permanent job at the company where the young person trained.
If there is a downside to the German system, it is that it can be inflexible, because a person trained in a specific skill may find it difficult to switch vocations if demand shifts.
In South Carolina, apprenticeships are mainly funded by employers, but the state introduced a four-year, annual tax credit of $1,000 per position in 2007 that proved to be a boon for small- to medium-size companies. The Center for American Progress report recommends a similar credit nationwide that would rise to $2,000 for apprentices under age 25.
The emphasis on job training has also been a major calling card overseas for South Carolina officials, who lured BMW here two decades ago and more recently persuaded France’s Michelin and Germany’s Continental Tire to expand in the state.
“The European influence is huge,” said Brad Neese, director of Apprenticeship Carolina, which links the state’s technical college system with private companies to help create specialized programs. “They are our strongest partners.”
European companies are major employers in the state, with more than 28,000 workers for German companies alone. The influx has helped stanch much of the bleeding caused by the decades-long erosion of jobs in the textile industry, once the economic bulwark of the Palmetto state.
Of course, there are other reasons foreign companies have moved here. For starters, wages are lower than the national average. Even more important for many manufacturers, unions have made few inroads in South Carolina.
Still, the close cooperation between employers and the state educational system is unusual, and despite initial skepticism on both sides, apprenticeship opportunities are rapidly expanding both for high-school age students and for older workers.
Apprenticeship Carolina started in 2007 with 777 students at 90 companies. It now has 4,500 students at more than 600 companies in the state, with the typical apprentice in his or her late 20s. Mr. Neese’s goal is to have 2,000 companies by 2020.
To help develop his program, Mr. Neese has traveled to Germany, Austria and Switzerland, where apprenticeships are thriving, youth unemployment is relatively low and blue-collar jobs are still prized. That contrasts with the United States, where the economic fortunes of younger people with just a high school diploma have plummeted, and the unemployment rate among workers age 16 to 19 stands at more than 20 percent.
“This generation has taken a huge hit from the economic crisis,” said Alexander Gelber, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley and a former senior Treasury official. “Apprenticeships offer people the possibility of building skills when they often don’t have many other options.”
So why have they not caught on in the United States like in Germany, which has 1.8 million apprentices with less than one-third the population?
Besides a longstanding stigma attached to vocational education, opposition from entrenched interests on both the left and the right has hobbled past efforts to promote apprenticeships, including under President Clinton in the 1990s.
Joerg Klisch discovered this firsthand when he started seeking support for the program in 2011.
School officials were wary of allowing a private company to dictate the curriculum. Meanwhile, among employers, “there seems to be a perception that apprenticeship means unions,” Mr. Klisch said. “It doesn’t, but we have to overcome this hurdle.”
Here in Greer, where more than 7,000 employees produce over 300,000 S.U.V.’s and other luxury cars a year in a sprawling, ultramodern BMW factory, Richard Morris, vice president for assembly and logistics, identifies one of the company’s biggest problems: a serious shortage of medium-skilled workers who specialize in mechatronics, or repairing robots and metal presses when they break down and operating the computers that dot the paint shop, body shop and assembly shop. Not only do these jobs pay better than typical assembly-line positions, they also open up avenues for advancement.
Werner Eikenbusch, manager of work force development for BMW in the Americas, is himself the product of an apprenticeship program in Germany who later went back to school and earned a master’s degree in engineering. He helped create the BMW Scholars program in 2011, he said, “to build the skills from the ground up.”
The BMW Scholars are older than Tognum’s apprentices — mostly in their 20s and 30s — and they study full-time at local technical colleges for two years while also working in the BMW factory for 20 hours a week.
“It is a struggle, but if you know how to manage the time, it is not hard,” said Benjamin Peoples, a 27-year-old BMW Scholar who dropped out of Clemson University a few years ago because he could no longer afford it. “I wanted to work with my hands and with machines, but I didn’t have experience with robots.”
Mr. Eikenbusch has been pitching the program to European parts suppliers in the area, as well as to executives at Boeing, which began building sections of the new 787 Dreamliner in Charleston in 2011. He hopes they will follow BMW’s lead.
“We need to find a way to establish two-year training programs on a broader scale,” he said. “Everybody who I hire is someone who is not available for our suppliers to hire.”
In Subways, Suddenly, 2 Glimpses of History
http://nyti.ms/1c1f8zY
One is a century-old transit hub permitted to age gracefully beneath Lower Manhattan, its chandeliers, terra-cotta tiles and ceiling of Guastavino vaults carefully preserved.
The other is the subway system’s forgotten shame, cast in blue spray paint and corrugated metal, then suspended in disrepair since the grime-and-graffiti era of the 1970s, when it served a neighborhood in Brooklyn that bears little resemblance to today’s.
There are more than a few stations hidden in the city’s underground thickets, but none offer more contrasting images of New York’s past than these two: Old City Hall Station, the flagship of the Interborough Rapid Transit Company, and the lower level at Bergen Street, last seen widely as the backdrop of a horror film.
Now, for equally divergent reasons involving train turnarounds and the vicissitudes of repair, both can be glimpsed for those who know where to look. The first case is deliberate: The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has in recent years begun allowing riders to stay on the No. 6 train as it turns around at the southern end of its run. The second is not. In the last several months, planned and unplanned work on the Culver Line in Brooklyn has often rerouted F trains to the old express tracks that pass below Cobble Hill.
Among history-minded riders, the stations have for decades stood as emblems of the transit system’s dueling legacies. They are the impossible standard and the indelible blight — the reason today’s wistful older riders can be sorted into two camps: those for whom hindsight has softened the edges of the subway’s darkest days, and the dwindling few with memories long enough to include its most regal beginnings.
The stations are particularly striking because they can be glimpsed almost accidentally, by a straggler who overslept on the Lexington Avenue line, waking to discover a turn-of-the-century gem on the loop track at Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall, or by a commuter aboard a surprise express to Manhattan.
For such F train riders, there is the dash past the outdoor stations at Fourth Avenue and Smith-Ninth Street, then the telltale dip at Carroll Street, as the platform recedes overhead.
And then it appears, faintly at first, followed by two surges of light: the moldering columns, a staircase leading to a dim concourse, and walls of graffiti — some fresh, some apparently decades old. The station was closed to passengers in 1976.
“It’s sort of a window back into that time when the subway system was different, and not nearly as safe,” said Benjamin Kabak, the publisher of the website Second Ave. Sagas, who recently passed the old station during a spell of weekend work on the F. “It looked like the train could stop and let people on right now.”
But few chapters from the system’s past so rankle the transportation authority, which declined to discuss the station in detail. For one, the authority is mindful of persistent calls to restore F express service in Brooklyn, fearing that any mention of the station might convince riders that it could be renovated adequately. Officials also noted security concerns and a desire to “discourage urban explorers” from venturing underground.
At City Hall, though, a sense of adventure is celebrated. On the authority’s website, members of the New York Transit Museum are encouraged to buy $40 tickets for a tour of the station, referred to by its nickname, “the Jewel in the Crown.” There are two sessions in December.
For the 100th anniversary of the subway system in 2004, the station, which was closed in 1945 because its platforms could not accommodate 10-car trains, was reopened for a ceremony with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Workers dressed in turn-of-the-century outfits, as Mr. Bloomberg helped maneuver a vintage four-car train.
Less elaborate outings have also been condoned. Though conductors were in the past known to expel passengers at the end of the No. 6 line, announcements on many trains have been adjusted to reflect a change. “The next stop on this train will be Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall, on the uptown platform,” the message now says, in a nod to riders who might remain on board. The cost for them, of course, is that of a single ride.
Even the pace of the train is cooperative, at least compared with the express-powered blur past Bergen Street. A recent, unhurried rumble through the loop revealed the skylights, the faience signs, the arched entryway illuminated by six temporary bulbs.
“It’s a salute to an era when subways were meant to enhance the quality of life in the city,” said Gene Russianoff, a longtime transit advocate for the Straphangers Campaign. “I guess they do now, but not with beautiful stations.”
On a recent afternoon, Bersio Pupo, 46, and Yara Noronha, 31, visiting from Brazil, said they had come to the station after seeing images of it in a book of photographs. It reminded them of Estação da Luz in São Paulo.
But it is possible that today’s Bergen Street guests have the stronger grasp of the system’s past. One veteran graffiti writer, who requested anonymity because he is not allowed to traverse the tunnels, said he had visited the lower level three times in recent years to take in the art and add his own. “The people who end up there are usually people who know their history,” he said.
The Brooklyn station received perhaps its widest exposure in 1990, as the setting of a scene in “Jacob’s Ladder,” starring Tim Robbins as a troubled Vietnam War veteran. That is thought to be perhaps the last time the station was opened for anyone besides transit personnel.
Adrian Lyne, the film’s director, said in a phone interview that the hub had thrived in its supporting role. “It worked very well for me,” he recalled. “It’s a rather ghostly place.”
Why are we more scared of raw egg than reheated rice?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25154046
